I've returned from the Naace conference, which ran from Tuesday to Thursday night last week. Like last year, it was held at Torquay, a seaside town in Devon, England. It was a rather jam-packed affair, with a great deal of choice as to which sessions to go to. That is always a chance thing, and there is little more annoying than selecting a session to go to and then discovering, too late, that it is not what you hoped for. Fortunately, that happened to me only once.
I've recorded the sessions I attended, and also recorded some great conversations between delegates, including Dave Warlick, Ewan McIntosh and others. I will be posting them here over the next few days. Although I noted my reflections at the time, I refrained from live blogging, ie blogging whilst the session is going on. This was for both personal and practical reasons. On a personal level, I prefer to reflect at leisure before reporting on something. On a practical level, I did not have a laptop handy.
The conference was opened, as ever, by the Chair of Naace (currently Gareth Davies), followed by an address by the Education Minister for England & Wales. That is almost always done via video conferencing. However, this time Jim Knight, the Minister, appeared via Second Life.
I like to think that this was for better reasons than mere gimmickry. Although the English love to moan, and one of the things we moan about is Government policies, I don't think there can be any doubt that over the last 11 years there has been an unprecedented commitment to educational ICT. That has shown itself in funding, experiments, research and a proliferation of websites, as well as laudable attempts to see ICT embedded in all kinds of official frameworks.
The opening keynote, by John Naughton, gave much food for thought. He drew heavily on the ideas of Neil Postman, regarding the medium as ecology. In this paradigm, new technologies do not replace older ones, but change the ecology. Thus, for example, digitisation has not led to the death of the paperback novel, but it has changed the delivery mode of Encyclopaedia Britannica. I will be posting my recording of this later this week.
I have to say, though, that I find it deeply worrying that Naughton is apparently unaware of the evidence that educational ICT makes a difference. It's one thing to doubt the value of research, but to state that it does not exist when there are huge amounts of it is another matter. In fact, although Naughton's address was superficially entertaining and thought-provoking, I am not sure it moved us on at all. Like many people, he stated that the speed of change is a problem. So what else is new? And so what? But let's leave that for now: I will return to it in the near future.
Ewan McIntosh's talk was interesting, not least because I disagreed with most of it. I liked his concept of the "digital holidaymaker", but thought that his stance that there is no such thing as key influencers was complete tosh. And if he really does believe that, what was he doing there? The only reason that any conference invites anyone to speak is because they are hoping the audience will be influenced in some way. And isn't that the reason for accepting such an invitation?
Niel Mclean, 
A talk by Mary Le Breully, a school improvement advisor in ICT for Solihull Local Authority was very interesting. I didn't learn anything new, but had some of my own ideas confirmed, which is always welcome! I felt that there was not enough focus on the importance of the teacher's role, however. I was also struck by the complete absence of irony with which she mentioned, more than once, the use of boring PowerPoint presentations, even though her own was certainly not the most imaginative I have seen.
Other sessions I gained a lot from were those by David Anstead, on Ofsted's findings about ICT in schools from 2004-7, Professor John Stein's lecture on the brain, Jim Gamble's hard-hitting talk on e-safety --
Don't call it child pornography, call it child abuse, because that's what it is.
and Stephen Heppell's final address, in which he talked about the trap of incrementalism. Parts of Martin Littler's talk, on ICT and Inclusion, were very enlightening (and shocking), but I could have done without the parts which seemed to be historical observations just for their own sake.
Most disappointing of all were two talks (back to back) on handheld learning. There seemed to me to be very little that was strategic about them, and were, in effect, extended advertisements for the products in question. Perhaps I would have surmised that this would be the case had I had time to read the descriptions properly. Even so, this was meant to be a strategic conference, and to address the issue of security by saying something to the effect that "Nobody in the schools I have been dealing with has been mugged for their handheld computer, so it should be alright" is, frankly, an insult to our intelligence. I will not dwell on it any further.
The discussion groups seemed to work well. When I saw how many there were (20) running at the same time, I was dubious. However, they afforded an opportunity for some in-depth discussions and exchanges of views. An improvement for future years would be the use of technology rather than a flipchart and felt-tip pens to manage the meetings.
The part of the title of this post about feeling old relates to the tendency of some presenters to talk about the old days, when disks were 8 inches wide and schools had two computers if they were lucky. Well, I was there too, and I did my fair share of pioneering, but who cares? As TS Eliot said,
"Not farewell, but fare forward, voyagers."
Of course, the main point of any conference is networking, exchanging ideas, and commiserating with others facing the same issues. From that point of view, the conference was a great success. The administration was faultless, and the dinner/dance excellent. What's more, I met some interesting "new" people, such as Colin Watson, and Rob Ellis (who has himself reflected on the conference), as well as "old" ones.
As I said earlier, I will be posting the audios from each of the sessions I attended with the exception of the two "advertising" sessions and, possibly, the Ofsted one. The volume was very low, and I am not sure I can amplify it without making it unbearable. We shall see.
Another audio I shall be publishing here is a series of interviews/discussions I had with conference delegates. They were very good, and well worth listening to.
Walking along the street singing to yourself is not a sign of madness these days but more likely to signify that the singer is the owner of an MP3 player, the most trendy of which is the iPod. Sitting on the train on the train recently I was able to spot half a dozen fellow travellers sporting the identifiable white earplugs which signified that they were the owner of an iPod – the “must have”, cool MP3 technology. 
